An Unlikely Spy

by Rebecca Starford

  “You remember Talbert, don’t you, Evelyn?” Jonty said. “He arranged this handy spot for us by the music.”

  “Evelyn,” Talbert slurred. “Jolly good to see you again. You’re the German, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That Boche girl, from the party at Wesley Manor. Lovely arse.”

  “Michael, do behave.” Julia guided Evelyn to a seat farthest from Talbert. “And do keep your voice down. Evelyn is not German. Do you want to have us all arrested?”

  “Beg pardon, beg pardon,” Talbert muttered, his head swaying out of rhythm to the music. “See, we’re celebrating tonight, Evelyn. I’m being shipped out next week to HMS Ramillies. It’s escort duties in the North Atlantic for me.”

  They finished the champagne and Talbert went to order another bottle, but as he returned from the bar a group of smartly dressed men and women approached their table, old friends of Julia it seemed, and she was soon drawn away, though promising it wouldn’t be for long. There was dancing next, followed by more drinking. Talbert was a surprisingly handy dance partner, but after the third bottle Evelyn began to fade. With Talbert’s arm firmly around her lower back, she must have put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, because when she opened them again she wasn’t on the dance floor with Sally and Jonty or even back at their table, but pressed against a wall in the dingy corridor near the cloakroom, the music thrumming through a set of velvet curtains, Talbert’s hand inside her underwear. He was fumbling about, his fingers working in a furious stabbing motion, while his other hand grasped Evelyn by the throat, his big thumb tracing her bottom lip.

  “Michael, what on earth?” She tried to push him away, but he was too heavy.

  “Don’t you like it? Doesn’t it feel right?” He mashed his face against hers, all stubble and sour breath. “Come on. I might be fish food in a few weeks. Don’t know when I’ll get another chance to—”

  Evelyn pushed him away again. “Will you stop it!”

  “What’s the matter?” He stepped back now, blinking at her, his mouth hanging open. “Evelyn?”

  She stumbled back to the dance floor, elbowing through the remaining couples, desperately searching for their table and her handbag. Scrabbling around behind the stools, she found it tucked beneath one of the curtains, and as she went to stand up she heard a laugh and saw Julia dancing just a few meters away. Evelyn crouched down farther, raising her handbag to her face like a mask. She watched Julia moving to a quick foxtrot. Her partner was a short, dark-haired man in a tuxedo, a small, waxy mustache imprinted in a line above his lip. He looked Mediterranean, Spanish perhaps, and when he released Julia’s hand in a flourish, making her pirouette, she cried, “Andreas!”

  Evelyn got to her feet and rushed past, her legs moving of their own accord, then she was upstairs and bursting into the fresh night air—only it wasn’t night but the washed-out gray of dawn. She had a moment to register her relief at being outside before she scuttled toward Shaftesbury Avenue and vomited in the gutter.

  She crouched like that for several minutes, retching and spitting, until she felt steady enough to stand. Her head was throbbing. If Julia came out now, Evelyn believed she actually might die of shame. But she didn’t, though Evelyn spotted Michael Talbert across the street, gripping a lamppost and straining forward like a dog on a leash.

  “I take it you don’t fancy another jive?” he called.

  Then came the sound of heels on the pavement; Julia had appeared at the top of the stairs in an enormous mink coat.

  She gave Talbert a filthy look. “Do bugger off now, Michael,” she snapped. “There’s a good boy.”

  She strode over to Evelyn and pulled her into a fierce hug. She smelled of stale smoke and perfume, and something else sweet, like grapes.

  “I’m sorry,” Julia whispered.

  She took off her coat and wrapped it around Evelyn’s trembling bare shoulders. Then she reached for her hand and they began walking. Evelyn thought Talbert might come after them, but when she glanced behind her she could see he’d already disappeared back inside the club.

  “Are you all right?”

  Julia was watching her, concern in her amber eyes. There was a faint smear of kohl on her cheek.

  “I’m fine.” Evelyn swallowed. Her head was still pounding. “You’re not cold without your coat?”

  “No. I love it. Makes me feel alive.”

  “What about Sally?”

  “She’s gone home with Jonty.”

  “And your other friends? Won’t they miss you?”

  But Julia only gave Evelyn’s hand a squeeze.

  “Listen, I know a place where we can get a decent cup of tea,” she said. “It’s just down here. They should be open now. Shall we?”

  “All right.” Evelyn felt her voice shake. “Thank you.”

  Julia gave a brisk nod and on they went.

  At the corner, waiting for a taxi to pass, Evelyn raised her face to the sky. As she did, she closed her eyes, and felt the tender scratch of snow on her lips, her cheeks, her eyelids. The snow would fall thick over London that morning.

  Eight

  THE WORK AT the Scrubs continued through the last scraps of autumn. There were more reports and more memos, though Chadwick soon began Evelyn on new tasks. Once a week, she prepared documents for his meetings with the interior minister and the undersecretary, who later made inspections of the wing, and after they’d gone Chadwick would appear in the doorway, a relieved smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as if he were a schoolboy and had just escaped a caning.

  “Looks to be a nice day out there,” he might say, standing on tiptoe for a glimpse of life through their smudged cell window. Evelyn never knew quite how to reply. When it wasn’t raining, she would spend her lunch breaks rugged up on the bench beneath the birch tree. Sometimes Vincent would join her and they would share one of his little cigars, and afterward he would bring out the newspaper and they would take turns reading the headlines in absurd German accents.

  Vincent was her only real friend at the Scrubs, and she found herself thinking about him while she made a cup of tea upstairs or touched up her lipstick in the loo by the common room. He wasn’t like Jonty or Michael Talbert, or even much like Philip. He was handsome in a Byronic sort of way, but she found she liked looking at him and talking to him for the sake of it, not because she felt any attraction to him. She couldn’t imagine ever kissing him. She got the sense he didn’t want to kiss her either.

  Some evenings they met for a boozy supper at Quo Vadis around the corner from her flat. Vincent knew the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Leoni, who after tiramisu often brought them over a bottle of grappa that they usually finished there at the table, the ashtray overflowing with Evelyn’s cigarettes. She liked getting drunk with Vincent; it meant they could talk uninterrupted for hours. And he was always interested in the reports she made, the files she read, and what she thought about the work they did at the Scrubs. Apart from Sally, she’d never had a friend who cared quite so much about what she had to say.

  “You know, Chaddy thinks you’re the best decrypter in the Service,” she told him late one of these nights as the old waiter began sweeping the tiled floor. They had been the only patrons for the past hour, but no one seemed in a rush for them to leave. Evelyn dreaded the arrival of the bill, but Vincent paid every time—somehow he was never without a wad of pound notes clipped together in his pocket. “So go on, tell me: how did you get so good at those codes?”

  “Well, it’s all a game, isn’t it?” Vincent said as he struck a match, his face suddenly ghoulish in the tawny light. “They’re just cryptic crosswords, really, and I’ve always been good at them.”

  “You should join the Eccentric Club.” Evelyn grinned. The table didn’t feel quite steady beneath her elbow; she really shouldn’t have drunk all that Poli. “It’s only a few blocks from here.”

  “Hm,” said Vincent, tapping at some ash. “Not sure how amenable they are to my sort, no m
atter how much decryption I’m doing for King and country.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be? You’re an Englishman.”

  Vincent set his cigar down on the lip of the ashtray. “Because I’m Jewish, darling. Or didn’t you know?”

  Evelyn felt her smile waver. “Actually, I don’t think I did.”

  Vincent held her eye, then shrugged. “Only I thought you must have heard.” He filled their glasses with the last of the grappa. “The occasional jibe, the odd snipe?”

  “No . . .” Evelyn remembered those looks across the caf from time to time, usually from one of their older, sterner colleagues. She had assumed they disapproved of Vincent’s youthful extroversion or his flamboyant lavender cravat, but could it have been something darker, meaner? Surely not. She had heard worse at school, anyway, she recalled dimly, and at university—such as from that awful gray-haired librarian when Evelyn borrowed a folio of The Merchant of Venice (“Have you read this?” the woman had asked, nudging a copy of The Kingdom of Shylock across the desk. “Very illuminating about the Yids . . .”). Evelyn pushed away her glass. With no Jewish friends of her own, she’d never had reason to pause and consider what these attitudes might mean, and she was now ashamed to realize that it had been language so ubiquitous it had hardly made an impression on her.

  “Are you very observant?” she asked.

  “Not especially. Though my aunt and uncle are quite devout, and when they come up from Cambridge it can be awkward. They’re always going on about the Sabbath and nagging me to attend the synagogue off Bevis Marks.” Vincent tipped some grappa into his mouth and stared at the empty glass. His eyes were very red. “I just can’t make them understand how believing seems so pointless. What kind of God allows all this horror in the world?”

  Evelyn felt a low drone start up at the back of her head. Despite all the drinking, she was now astonishingly alert. She sat forward, moving around in her mouth the words that she dreaded having to ask.

  “And your parents—what do they think?”

  Vincent was gazing at the tablecloth, stained from the excesses of their meal, and turning over the teaspoon that had accompanied their coffee hours ago—grateful, it seemed, for something else to fix his attention on.

  “They don’t think anything,” he said quietly. “Last year they were killed in Berlin. It happened during the pogrom of Kristallnacht. The Sturmabteilung came into their apartment and bludgeoned them to death.” He let out a shaky breath, almost like a laugh. “They used sledgehammers, I’m told. Mama and Papa were in bed. They probably didn’t know what was happening, which I suppose I should be thankful for. Nearly a hundred Jews were murdered that night, and barely a month after the Munich Agreement.” Vincent peered at Evelyn from beneath his dark fringe, smiling grimly. “And still people think Hitler can be trusted on appeasement.”

  Evelyn stared back at him, her heart pummeling at her breast. Until that moment the war had felt abstract, mere spy craft of no real consequence played out at the Scrubs between well-mannered men and women. But now she finally absorbed the blunt reality that this was no game. That people were dying. Perhaps this had been Chadwick’s test for her—to see if she could adapt to this understanding without fear or equivocation. To see if she could live up to her responsibility.

  “Vincent, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I had no idea about your parents. This is just awful.”

  Vincent sniffed and sat back, and when he pressed his lips together Evelyn saw something defiant in his expression. She felt a throb of tenderness for him. What courage it must take to sit down each day and work on that decryption, to unpick those messages typed up in the language of his childhood, all the while knowing what those people—his people—had done to his own parents. She felt sick at her own ignorance.

  “That’s why our work is so important,” Vincent said. “We can’t let this happen to another family.” He reached into his jacket pocket for a moment before bringing out a small black-and-white photograph. “It’s the only picture I have of her. My mother. She was only forty-three. They ransacked the apartment and all my family’s albums were destroyed. But somehow this survived.”

  Evelyn stared at the dark, haunted eyes gazing out from a porcelain face framed by a black bob. But there was something steadfast about his mother’s expression that compelled Evelyn to consider just what she could see beyond the photograph.

  “What was her name?” she asked.

  “Anna.”

  Evelyn swallowed. Her throat was dry. “She looks like a very good sort, Vincent.”

  “Yes, she was.” He gazed at the portrait, then tucked it away again, keeping his hand pressed against the pocket as if to protect it. “She understood me. How many people can you say that about?”

  Evelyn watched Vincent run a hand through his hair. Then he twisted in his seat and called for the bill, his somber mood vanished. As he chatted with the waiter, she admired the neat line of his suit, the gentle slope of his proud shoulders. She wanted to say, “I understand you,” but she knew it would be a lie.

  * * *

  The next morning, Evelyn arrived at the Scrubs to find a neat pile of pale blue papers on her desk with the words MOST SECRET stamped in red at the top. It was the transcript of an interview between an officer and a woman referred to as ‘Dunlin’. The woman, a postmistress, had been passing on communiqués to a German national in Manchester.

  Evelyn read the interview. It was short, about five pages. Dunlin began with clumsy bravado (“I’ve got rights” and “It’s still a free country”), but by the end she had been reduced to tears, begging for forgiveness. Evelyn flicked back through the transcript and gleaned a few key details: the woman lived alone, had never married or had children, and had met the man through a lonely hearts agency.

  “Did you interview her, sir?” Evelyn asked when Chadwick appeared in the doorway later that day. “This Dunlin?”

  “Yes, at Latchmere House.”

  “The estate on Ham Common?”

  “That’s right. We’ve set up an interrogation center there.”

  “What happened to the lover?”

  Chadwick rubbed at the pouches beneath his eyes. “He went to ground, funnily enough, as soon as he got a sniff of trouble.”

  Evelyn stared at the transcript. “Are they all like this, these assets? Women exploited?”

  “Generally.”

  “And what will happen to her? Is she looking at prison?”

  Chadwick shrugged. “That’s not for us to decide, but I imagine the judge will sentence her to two years, at least.”

  Evelyn shook her head. “She’s hardly a threat to the nation . . . She’s just a lonely old woman.”

  “Hm.” Chadwick was rummaging around for his cigarettes in the drawer. “If that were the case, perhaps she should have joined her local Women’s Institute instead.”

  Evelyn returned to her desk and began another report, but her mind kept straying back to Dunlin from Aberdeen. It was all such low-grade stuff. The case hadn’t hinged on much—a few letters from Berlin, some questionable information about a freighter at the docks. Surely it would have been better to cultivate this woman and her connections to lure her lover out again? It seemed like a wasted opportunity, and glancing toward Chadwick, Evelyn realized with perfect clarity that she wanted to get inside that interrogation room.

  * * *

  A couple of days later she approached Chadwick with another transcription, this time involving a German national arrested in her bakery in Hackney. Coded messages rolled up inside a film canister had been found baked into blueberry muffins. The detained woman had wanted to speak in German to her interrogator, but they had denied her an interpreter at Latchmere House, meaning the transcription was a mess of broken English and a few phrases of muddled German.

  “There are quite a few mistakes in this document,” Evelyn said, handing Chadwick the typed-up pages. “Versandbehälter is actually a shipping container, not a parcel, which I suppose has a bearing on the i
ntelligence?”

  “Hm.” Chadwick, with a grunt, snatched the paper away.

  “And would it not, I don’t know . . .” Evelyn searched for a delicate way to phrase it. “Would it not be beneficial to interview some of these foreign nationals in their own language? This woman’s English is very poor. More information could have been sought in German.”

  Chadwick blew his red-looking nose. “Yes, I suppose it could have. Chap that did it only had a smattering, I believe.”

  Evelyn stood a little straighter. “Sir, I think I could be useful in cases like this. I’ve still not put my German to use, and I’ve more than a smattering of it.” She swallowed. “And it might be helpful to have a woman speaking to these suspects—whether they’re men or women. Offering, perhaps, a gentler touch?”

  Chadwick folded his arms. “Aren’t we keeping you busy enough?”

  “I’d like to do more.”

  “All right.” He gave her a slight smile. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  * * *

  When she got home that night, Evelyn telephoned Sally at Curzon Street. She longed to speak to her friend, to learn news of the world outside the echo chamber of Wormwood Scrubs. But Sally was out; she had been out all week, in fact, going to dress fittings and speaking to caterers. There was a letter from Julia, however, waiting on the hall table, inviting her to tea next week at the Dorchester—I’ll keep an eye out for you in your War Office regalia, I’m sure you look strapping in fatigues—and Evelyn took it up to her room and propped it on the mantelpiece.

  * * *

  The following week, Evelyn traveled with Chadwick to Latchmere House to interview a young man named Jacob Vermeer. Four Dutch parachutists had been picked up off the east coast of Ireland and brought to London—well, three now, as the fourth had swallowed cyanide on the flight back across the Irish Sea. Two of the Dutchmen had already given up intel about their mission, but Vermeer had so far held out. Believing this was because he had information about the next man-drop, Chadwick suggested Evelyn take part in the interrogation. “He won’t speak to us in English or even Dutch,” he’d explained on the drive from White City. “So let’s see what he’ll tell you in German.”